Levinas and ...

Term:
SPRING 2013

Subject Code:
GPHI

Course Number:
6086

This lecture course will attempt to introduce, explain and, to some extent, defend Levinas work via his complex relations to a series of other philosophers. Firstly, through those who most influenced him, positively and negatively: Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger.Secondly, through some of those readers who have engaged most powerfully with Levinas's work: Blanchot, Derrida and Irigaray. We will also examine Levinas's relation to a number of other 'ands': Judaism, psychoanalysis, Benjamin, Kant, politics, theories of the political, the problem of violence, sexual difference, the question of gender and the experience of literature. My overall aim is to show the persuasiveness and fragility of Levinas's thinking, where we will hopefully feel tempted and provoked by Levinas's thinking, but in a way that does not discourage critique.